Those are the sketchy recollections among some living members of the 1947 Topeka High baseball team, the first to capture a state championship for a Shawnee County high school.

History was achieved, however. The Trojans’ 13-1 run that season proved to be the beginning to a glorious prep heritage. Nine Shawnee County high schools have since combined for 37 state championships in baseball.

In recognition of its breakthrough title, the 1947 Topeka High team will be inducted Monday into the Shawnee County Baseball Hall of Fame at a 6 p.m. ceremony at Lake Shawnee’s Bettis Family Sports Complex.

Fittingly, the Troy squad that launched the county’s baseball superiority was loaded. Six players off the ’47 team went on to play professionally.

No doubt, the opponent the Trojans plastered in the finals could attest to High’s prowess. Troy walloped LaCrosse, 26-0, for the title as shortstop Dick McConnell and third baseman Bud Fawl each rapped four hits in support of the no-hitter tossed by Chick Gordon, who struck out 13. The game, scheduled for nine innings, was called in the seventh by mutual agreement of both sides.

“All (15) of the team’s players played. I think we thought it was a mismatch going in,” said McConnell, who went on to become an acclaimed high school basketball coach in Arizona. “(LaCrosse) had to use their No. 1 pitcher the day before when they upset a Wichita team in the semifinals.”

McConnell homered among his four hits, and yet did not remember his blast as anything special.

“We played the game in a really small ballpark in Abilene,” he said. “That (home run) didn’t mean a lot, because it seemed like we got about 20 hits.”

Just a couple seasons earlier as a sophomore, McConnell was part of a hidden ball trick that backfired and cost Topeka High a shot at the state title. So it was good to atone for that slip-up, even if the win over LaCrosse was lopsided.

“It turned out to be an easier game than what we thought in the finals,” said Gordon, who added three hits, including a double. “We were a good team, though, and it wasn’t just me. We had a good catcher and a good infield, and many of them went on to play for pro teams.”

Although none of the future pros reached the majors, they combined to play 23 professional seasons.

Pitchers Harland Coffman (62-46) and Ed Wilson (56-32) each pitched five years and finished with winning records. Frank Logan, who pitched collegiately for Dartmouth, signed with the Detroit system and went 20-19 over three seasons, making it as far as the Tigers’ top farm club, Little Rock, in 1955.

Others who played professionally off the 1947 Topeka High team were McConnell, outfielder Howard “Mace” Pool and catcher Richard Burgardt.

“I remember more about our Legion teams. It was maybe a little better organized and a longer season,” Logan said of the Mosby-Mack squads that ruled the state during that period. A longtime administrator at Dartmouth, Logan resides in Hanover, N.H.

Woody Bulkley, a reserve for the 1947 Trojans, even remembered taking a 10-day road trip that summer with the Legion outfit, a swing Mosby-Mack teams regularly made into Oklahoma and Arkansas. Before that stretch, though, Bulkley got into the blowout against LaCrosse.

“When you get ahead like that, they ran you in for the last out,” cracked Bulkley, who lives in Topeka. “That’s the way I was. I couldn’t hit a lick.”

Not that it mattered. That particular day, inside an Abilene bandbox, the Trojans collected 17 hits and Gordon faced just 23 batters in the decisive shutout over LaCrosse, which now competes in Class 1A and no longer fields a baseball program.

Classes AA and A were combined for the 1947 state tournament. Rose Hill nipped Washburn Rural, 2-1, for the Class B title, also played in Abilene.

The 1947 title remains the lone baseball championship for Topeka High, which disbanded its program for many years before baseball was reinstated in the 1990s.

By defeating LaCrosse, the Trojans avenged a pair of one-run defeats in previous state finals. It also marked the last game for Claude Hays, a quiet but well-respected coach who was described in one newspaper account as “the sage of Topeka baseball.”

Although he was known as Pappy, and was even referenced that way in write-ups, “nobody dared call him that,” McConnell said, before adding, “he was just a wonderful gentleman.”

After arriving at Topeka High in 1920 and helping coach football, Hays launched a baseball program in 1923.

Instrumental in the formation of several Topeka youth leagues, including American Legion teams, Hays coached three seasons at Washburn following his retirement from Topeka High. He also covered baseball for the Daily Capital. In 1967, Hays was named Sportsman of the Year at Topeka’s annual all-sports banquet. He died in 1970.

“He was quite a coach. He would get over on that third-base line and just sit there, but he knew what we has doing,” Gordon said. “He was very quiet. He gave signals and people thought he wasn’t doing much, but he sure knew what was going on.”

To this day, the mutual respect the former Trojans express for their coach is the most telling remembrance of that 1947 championship. The exploits of team members that season, and over time, proved they learned to handle challenges quite well.